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How the western has won

Brad Pitt as Jesse James
  • Posted at 3:04pm
  • 20 November 2007
  • by AndrewCollins-RT
  • 2 comments

As a fan of westerns, I will always return to the classics of John Ford (My Darling Clementine), Howard Hawks (The Big Sky) and Anthony Mann, whose Winchester '73 was one of five collaborations out west with James Stewart. These examples come from the genre's heyday.

In his book The Crowded Prairie, historian Michael Coyne sets the premature demise of the western in 1980 (the very year, he reminds us with some irony, that Americans elected screen cowboy Ronald Reagan as president). In short order, three revisionist westerns flopped: The Long Riders, Tom Horn and Heaven's Gate – the latter notoriously taking down a studio (United Artists) with it. Coyne concludes that "the western will never regain its former pre-eminence", but the signs are currently good for another cowboy film revival.

In the early 1990s, two horse operas won the best picture Oscar – Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven – and these past few years have been encouraging for fans of Monument Valley, wagon trains and chewing tobacco, with the sexually charged Brokeback Mountain, the outback-set The Proposition, Tommy Lee Jones's The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and Open Range starring Kevin Costner. But 2007 has been vintage, with wide releases for Seraphim Falls, 3:10 to Yuma (a remake of the 1957 original) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which opens this week. What makes westerns problematic to watch in this modern era is our wider understanding of the genocide of native Americans that often went hand in hand with the pioneer spirit. My own theory as to why these films abide, and why film-makers keep returning to them, is that they depict a time before technology, when the railroad represented not only a better-connected future but also the end of a romantic ideal – the uncharted wilderness.

Me? I just enjoy seeing the likes of Russell Crowe, Brad Pitt and Pierce Brosnan in action films without mobile phones or laptops.

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Comments

  • Posted on 18 January 2008
  • at 12:37pm
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

Good point about modern actors looking a little too "healthy" to carry off a western, although I found Russell Crowe totally convincing in 3:10 to Yuma (he being a farmer, basically), and Brosnan's performance in Seraphim Falls was pretty physical.

Please accept that I am a real fan of Westerns, and that the reason I didn't mention Leone is that it's hard to fit an exhaustive history of any genre into 250 words!

  • Posted on 17 January 2008
  • at 7:44pm
  • by humblescholar

I find it hard to accept that you are a real fan of Westerns but have failed to consider the works of Sergio Leone.

Its not the inability to depict palefaces killing Indians with any sympathy that makes modern westerns problematic -its the insistence of casting directors to fill them full of people who look like they should be on a catwalk. Few of them look at all as if they have spent any time outdoors doing a day's work. Pitt and Prosnan, talented actors as they are in many other spheres, just can't manage to look like they may have been tired, overworked or malnourished at any significant period in their lives.

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